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Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Oriental Accents: In which I strap on some armor

Last Sunday we took another little family outing. This time, we went to the Bokcheon Museum, which is located next to some 4th-5th century tumuli (barrow mounds...no wights encountered, luckily). The museum houses lots of artifacts from the graves and other similar grave sites around the Busan area, and explain a lot of the Gaya Kingdoms culture in the early to mid-1st Millennium AD (or CE if you're one of those pompous PC types).

Lamellar armor and barding

The Gaya Kingdoms had Iron Age tech (some apparently borrowed from the neighboring and more advanced Silla kingdom to the north, some possibly inspiring elements of Yayoi culture in Japan).

rusty breastplates

Me wearing plate armor made for someone much slimmer than I am.

Interesting for me was the armor found in the sites. Cavalry wore lamellar armor (what you normally think of as Chinese/Korean armor, with lots of little rectangular plates woven to a leather or cloth backing). But there were several examples of iron breastplates worn by infantry, which were solid in the back, hinged on the sides, and laced vertically up the middle in the front (seems like not the smartest way to do it to me, but I guess it worked for them).

the solid back plate

I think both OA books eliminate Platemail (or the 3E equivalents), but there were armors like that outside of Japan. I'm fond of the tropes of chanbara, but at the same time I hate to limit my OA games to just samurai stuff. So the next time I run a game of OA, I'll be sure to include plate as an option.

Wearing lamellar

The museum is right next to the reconstructed walls of the Dongnae Eupsong (the location I used for my Chainmail game last year), so I'll post some more about that later.